by James Hunt
The young man stuttered, his lips moving faster than his mouth. “U-Umm. Six months. Today.”
Cooper hunched over the table, leaning closer. “What does she do for a living?”
The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “She’s a teacher. An English teacher.”
Cooper circled the table, Hart watching her as he remained quiet in his chair, writing down the man’s responses. “What about you? What’s your profession?”
“I’m studying for my doctorate in History at the University of Maryland.”
Cooper grabbed the young man by his shoulders, and he looked bewildered and confused. “Today, six months. You were going to celebrate with her, right?”
“Y-Yes,” he stuttered in answer.
Cooper dug her fingers into the man’s shoulders tightly, and he winced. “Is there somewhere special you were going to take her?”
“Westminster Hall. We both have an affinity for Edgar Allen Poe. It’s one of the things we spoke about on our first date.”
Cooper released the young man and bolted out of the room. She found Hemsworth on the way to the parking lot and smacked him on the shoulder. By the time he looked up both she and Hart were at the door. “Tell your people to get to Westminster Hall! Now!”
Chapter 7
Cooper swayed left, then right, her shoulder slamming against the car door as Hart maneuvered through traffic that parted from the wailing siren and flashing lights. She bounced her knee up and down nervously, the adrenaline coursing through her veins eradicating the fatigue of her body. “The killer’s keeping this one alive.”
Hart kept his eyes on the road, jerking the steering wheel left and right on their way to the heart of the city. “You think he’s waiting for us at Westminster with another bomb or something?”
“No. This will be different. He wants to keep us on our toes.” Cooper balled her hands into fists, glancing out the window at the passing traffic and buildings. “Why would he try and keep one of them alive?” She retraced the letters in her mind, trying to single out anything they shared in common. “Both letters had some representation of an anniversary, a date. The killer punishes the victim by making their families suffer.” That’s why he took Beth. To make me suffer. But why?
The squad car’s engine revved as Hart floored the accelerator. The FBI sedans were close behind, but they arrived at Westminster first. What few people were at the grounds immediately started taking pictures of the massive police force that overwhelmed the property, followed quickly by the news crews that had chased them from the precinct. “Hart, get some officers over here to deal with crowd control. This place is about to turn into a mad house.”
Hart radioed for backup, and Cooper followed the signs to the main office, where she was greeted by an elderly woman sitting behind a desk. “Ma’am, I need you to call all of your employees on the premises to the front office.” She flashed her badge. “I also need to take a look at any security footage you have.”
The old woman’s jaw hung loose. “We don’t have a lot of staff here during the week, especially in the morning. But I can call our groundskeeper if you’d like.” She looked past Cooper to the widow and the growing spectators and cars outside. “Is there something wrong?”
“Everything’s fine, ma’am.” Hemsworth entered and gave an assuring nod. “Detective, I need a word.” Cooper followed him around to the side of the main administration building, out of view of the reporters. “Mind telling me what we’re dealing with here?”
Cooper retrieved the note, handing it to him. “A young woman was taken, and I think she’s buried somewhere on the grounds. And I think we have a limited amount of time to pull her out of this alive.”
Hemsworth slowly turned and examined the hundreds of headstones that lined the property until he reached the entrance of the catacombs. “Hell of a place to find someone alive.”
“Hemsworth, we can save her.” She felt the well of desperation rising in her voice, and just before he answered, the invasion of a microphone in his face disrupted his thought.
“Janet Kimmings, Channel Four News. Did the killer strike again?” The reporter shifted the microphone between Hemsworth and Cooper. “Could there be another bomb ready to blow on the premises?”
Hemsworth shoved the camera out of his face and waved his arms. “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to step back. We’re in the middle of a crime scene, and we need to secure the perimeter. Tommy!” Another agent jogged over and removed the reporter and her cameraman from their sight and back behind the police line being set up.
Cooper felt the pressure mounting. She couldn’t afford to be wrong anymore. Too much was at stake, and time was running out. Just find the girl. She’s here. I can save her. Another long exhale, and she looked back to the building, where she saw Hart speaking with the groundskeeper. The old man was rubbing the stubble along his jaw when she walked up. “We need to see where Edgar Allen Poe was buried.”
“It’s to the east of the property, but I can tell you I was just near there and didn’t see anything.” The old groundskeeper pointed a shaky finger in the general direction, and before he could finish his slow step forward Cooper had already broken into a sprint. Her hastened pace triggered Hart and a few of the FBI agents to spring into action, and they weaved through the ancient graves of Westminster Hall.
The headstones she passed varied in size and shape, but nearly all of them had been weathered by time, some of the lettering on the stones undecipherable. Twice Cooper stumbled over the raised stones that sealed the dead in their graves. Her feet smacked the path of paved brick and grass, pushing herself closer to Poe’s monument.
“I found it here!” Hart said.
The monument stood five feet high and nearly as many feet wide. But underneath was nothing but solid brick and concrete. Cooper placed her hand on the warm stone, shaking her head. “This doesn’t make any sense.” She searched for any scrape marks along the ground, anything that would have signaled the stone had been moved.
“There’s no way this guy could have buried her under here.” Hart followed Cooper around the stone twice, grabbing her arm to force her to stop. “Cooper. She’s not here.”
A warm breeze grazed Cooper’s cheek and blew scattered leaves against her pant legs. Cooper brushed the hair out of her eyes and motioned toward the rest of the compound. “We need to search the property. Anything that feels or looks out of place, I want it turned over.” She looked back to Hart. “We’ll check the catacombs below.”
Cooper and Hart followed the groundskeeper underneath the church while Hemsworth directed the FBI on the surface. When she took the first step into the darkness she heard the barks of the K-9 units unleashed onto the property, their howls echoing into the tombs below.
A few dim lights guided their path once beneath the ground, and the air grew cold and damp. The old groundskeeper shuffled forward, the hem of his trousers scraping the dirty pavement as they passed the ancient tombs. Cooper reached for her flashlight, searching each tomb she passed, checking to see if any had been moved, but every piece of stone she examined hadn’t been touched for centuries. She pointed the light ahead, and the halls twisted farther than her light reached. “How many tombs are down here?”
The groundskeeper scratched the bottom of his chin and squinted his face in concentration. “I think we have somewhere around one hundred and eighty plots here, and, hey!” The old man shouted at Cooper as she tried to lift one of the stone lids on the nearest tomb. He hobbled over, knocking her hands away. “You’re not allowed to disturb these, lady. These things are nearly as old as I am.”
“A woman is buried under one of these. Alive. And every second we waste debating on whether or not we’re disturbing the dead is one more that ticks closer to adding her to the number buried down here.” Cooper’s voice grew louder, the musty air of the dead mocking her rage. “Now open the fucking graves!”
The old man looked past Cooper to the other officers and then slowly nod
ded. “Fine. But I’m not going to be the one who’s held responsible for this. In this life or the next.”
Crowbars were brought down with a dozen agents, and the race to find the woman was on. Iron scraped against ancient stone, and with every tomb overturned a musk of death filled the catacombs. But with every overturned rock only bones and tattered clothes were revealed. The skeletons smiled under the glow of flashlights, silently laughing as the sands of the woman’s hourglass slowly sifted away.
Twenty minutes had passed, and Hart jogged from the far end of the catacombs, crowbar in hand, with three agents behind him. “She’s not down here, Cooper.” He looked behind him, pointing deeper into the darkness. “We’ve checked all of them in the back. It’s nothing but corpses.”
Cooper shone the light over the FBI agents and the exposed tombs. She paced back and forth in the same six-foot space, retracing the letter the killer had forced Beth to write. What did I miss? What was I supposed to do? She slammed the flashlight on the ground, shattering the bulb inside. “She’s supposed to be here!” Her voice echoed through the long halls of the catacombs, bouncing over the ancient walls and back in her face, flushing her cheeks red. She shut her eyes, muttering the same words to herself over and over. I have to save her.
The touch of a hand on her shoulder ended the frantic mantra, and Hart lifted her chin. “Cooper, she’s not here.”
Footsteps echoed toward the catacombs’ entrance, and Hemsworth appeared, flanked by his agents. “We’ve scanned over half the property and haven’t found anything out of place.” The tone in his voice was as hard as the ancient stones that surrounded them. “Every news crew in the city is up there, and every single one of them is spinning a tale of panic!” He thrust his hands in the air, exasperated.
“Everything the killer has done so far—”
“Everything he’s done has been one step ahead of you!” Hemsworth thrust a finger in her face, and even in the dim lighting she could tell his cheeks had flushed red. “You were wrong, Detective. This guy is playing you.”
The strength and hope Cooper had clung to slowly dripped from her fingertips, and she felt the heavy weight of uncertainty fall onto her chest. She stumbled backward, feeling lightheaded and suddenly out of breath. “The note said we could save her, which meant she was, is,” she said, correcting herself, “still alive.” She pressed her hands against the side of one of the tombs, the exposed corpse casting its judgment. Color faded from the tips of her fingers the harder she pressed against the stone. “The woman is here, and she is running out of time.”
“We have nearly twenty agents and officers combing this place, and we have overturned every tomb we’ve come across,” Hemsworth said. “If she was here, then we would have found her already.”
Cooper cradled the side of her head, trying to think, trying to figure out what she missed. “Poe. That’s what was special to them. That was their connection. And that’s what he would use to tear them apart. She should have been buried there.”
“Cooper, Poe’s gravestone is cemented to brick,” Hart said, his tone firm but kind. “There’s no way he could have moved that in the time frame the girl was taken without someone noticing, or leaving behind something in the process.”
“It’s not a grave.”
Every head turned to the old groundskeeper, and Cooper was the first to reach him. “What?”
The old man shrugged, one of the straps of his overalls falling from his shoulder. “That’s just a monument to commemorate Poe. There isn’t anything buried underneath. His original grave is marked at another spot.”
Hemsworth and Hart radioed the agents and officers in the area toward the west side of the compound. The massive shift in resources converging on a single location caused the media to stir, and out of the peripheral of her right eye Cooper saw the bright flash of cameras and heard the deafening choir of questions hurled toward her on the run.
“Keep them back!” Hemsworth shouted as he kept stride with Cooper and the others.
Cooper checked the headstones for names, looking for the original marker, as the old groundskeeper was too slow to keep up with their hurried pace. Four more agents appeared with shovels, and the medical team that was on standby pulled their gurney over.
“I found it!” Hart jumped and shouted a few rows over.
Shovels hit the dirt before Cooper arrived, and she noticed the brokenness of the freshly laid sod over the gravesite. Another officer arrived with more shovels, and Cooper added her labor to the dig. Her shoulders burned with every scoop of earth cast aside, and when the metal tip of her shovel thudded against something hard she dropped to her knees, clawing through the dirt until she felt the grainy top of a box. “Find the edges!” Dozens of hands cleared the space, finding the corners until the top of the short coffin was completely unearthed. Cooper reached for the latch on the side, but it was locked. “We need bolt cutters over here, now!”
Hart handled the heavy tool and pried the jaws open wide enough to get a good grip on the lock. He pressed down, his face beet red and the veins along his neck pulsating as the metal on the lock whined. One more final squeeze, and it snapped in half, Hart exhaling as he collapsed backward.
Cooper lifted the hatch, the remaining dirt flinging from the opened top. The young woman inside was curled in a fetal position and unconscious. “Medic!” Cooper reached her hand out and pressed her fingers against the woman’s neck, looking for the pulse she prayed was still there. But before she felt the beat of life, medics pulled Cooper back and out of the way. Blue-gloved hands reached into the box, carefully removing the woman from her tomb, and set her on the gurney. An oxygen mask was placed over her nose and mouth, and one of the paramedics immediately placed both hands on the woman’s chest, pumping life back into her heart.
Sitting in the dirt, both hands in the soil, Cooper watched the paramedics wheel the woman away, and as they disappeared into the back of an ambulance she felt a piece of her fall into the grave they’d dug up. If that woman died, she wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take. But she understood one thing very clearly. The killer wanted her to know that he held all the cards. He was life and death. And he held her sister’s fate in his hands.
Chapter 8
The tall vaulted ceilings of the church of Westminster Hall echoed the loud chatter of the press corps and spectators outside. But inside all the long wooden pews were empty, save for one spot that Cooper had claimed. She leaned back, her bones as stiff as the wood underneath, and they both groaned from the motion.
The walls of the church were massive slabs of stone, laced with intricate patterns of statues, but what Cooper couldn’t take her eyes off of was the massive organ engraved into the far wall inside the church. The pipes of the instrument stretched all the way to the ceiling and numbered at least sixty across, all in different sizes and lengths. And every pipe funneled to the bottom, where they were controlled with a set of keys and foot pedals. She admired the dedication and time needed to build it, let alone play it. Her knees popped as she pushed herself from the pew and walked down the aisle. She squinted at the intricate detail of the designs painted along the pipes, the hand-carved wood that mounted the massive instrument into the church. She extended her arm and reached for one of the keys, but a voice pulled her hand back.
“Hey.” Hart met her halfway down the aisle, his face slightly pink from the morning out in the sun. “Hemsworth just got done with the press.”
“What’d he say?”
“He kept it vague. Pulled a lot of political moves by answering the questions without actually giving an answer.” He twirled the wedding band on his finger, a nervous habit. “The captain and the chief want you to make a brief statement.” Cooper rolled her eyes and headed for the door. Hart chased after her, cutting in front of her before she burst into the line of fire. “Hey, it’s not something you have to do now. Run it by PR first. Trust me. I’ve seen it get real ugly for officers who try and go off script, even when they�
�re in the right.”
“Hart, there’s a vindictive psychopath on the loose that’s killed dozens, maybe even hundreds of people over the past thirty years, and now has my sister. My precinct doesn’t trust me, and my brother-in-law wants to see me burn at the stake. I think it’s safe to say that if I fall I don’t have that far to drop.” Cooper brushed him aside and exited the sanctuary, where she was immediately swarmed by the buzzing insects that were the media.
“Detective Cooper, any updates on the case?”
“What are the killer’s demands?”
“Is the woman that was pulled out of here alive?”
“Is this connected to the bombing at the stadium?”
The questions were spitted faster than Cooper could answer. She held up her hands, the flash of cameras intensifying the afternoon sun and nearly blinding her. “We are gaining traction on the killer, and though he hasn’t made any demands, I want to encourage every citizen to exercise extreme caution until we have brought this killer to justice. Rest assured that myself, the Baltimore Police Department, and the FBI are doing everything within our power to restore peace to our city.”
Janet Kimmings, the reporter that had continuously plagued her earlier, burst through the front line of bodies and thrust the microphone near her mouth. “Detective, if you could speak to the man who has your sister, what would you tell him?”
Cameras clicked, and the hive of reporters grew silent, all of the microphones outstretched to catch the sound bite. Cooper paused, censoring the first few words that came to mind, knowing that this would be on the six o’clock news. She turned to the nearest camera and acted as if the killer were right in front of her. “There is no place you can hide, nowhere that you can run where I will not be able to find you. I will catch you. It’s only a matter of time. I promise.” She stepped aside, another slew of questioning aimed at her as officers and Hart boxed them out so she could enter her squad car.